Could you give a little more detail? Also living in the midwest, if I COMPLETELY replaced my electricity needs with solar, I could only spend about $4,000 total on a system and have it pay back in 3 years. In some very brief looking online, this MIGHT pay for the inverter and installation.
What size system did you install?

All that this shows is that there isn't much difference between the ISPs. They had to scale the chart (it doesn't start at 0) just to show the differences. As Netflix commented in the linked post, their HD streams are much higher (4.8kb) than these graphs. Of course the graph is just an average, so it doesn't speak to how HD users are affected.

hazzey writes: I don't work in IT, but my addiction to Slashdot implies a fascination with technology. I really enjoy the few times that the tech sites I visit post updates on their server equipment and administration issues. By far the best example of this is SetiAtHome. That blog has been updated weekly for years. In my search for similar reading I have even resorted to looking for informative answers to StackOverflow or ServerFault questions. What other examples of freqently updated real world server/network administration blogs are out there?

Another point which I rarely hear about in discussions of the iPhone is how it is fundamentally marketed differently. We have had an iPhone for many years now. It hasn't been the exact same hardware this whole time, but it has been an "iPhone" the whole time. Now think about other mobile phones. Ask someone what phone they have and it is either "LG", "Motorola", etc. Mobile phone models change so often than no one can remember what model they have currently, because there is a good chance that you can't even buy the model anymore. Apple has won the marketing game because by keeping the same name, they don't have to scrap all of their previous marketing whenever the model changes.

Not all games are twitchy FPSs and racing games though; and not every element in even *those* games has to be calculated for instant feedback.

Let's say you have a flamethrower in a game. You need to be able to see where the flames are going, and where your enemies are going, 'immediately' so that you can get a good kill.

But all the indirect lighting from those flames bouncing around in the scene lagging behind by, say, 150ms would be perfectly acceptable.

e.g. offload the intensive bits and pieces to the cloud, rather than the entire thing.

Although the entire thing would be possible in due time as well - players are already playing with lag; lag induced from rendering off-site is minimal compared to the hops between you and the average game server. Bandwidth is a far bigger concern; especially when you consider more and more ISPs introducing caps.

As far as CPUs go.. oh, absolutely, they'll get ever more powerful especially after Larrabee. But the games get more demanding as well. So now you need a new CPU, but it uses a different socket, so you get a new motherboard, turns out your old cooling fan won't fit, beside.. the TDP of the new CPU is 120W, so you'll need a watercooling solution anyway, etc. etc.There's a lot of reasons why 'gaming on the cloud' ( I do hate that term. ) can be a good thing (from the technical up above, to the energy efficiency, to technical support, to non-invasive anti-cheating constructions), just as there are down sides to it (potential for lag, slurps bandwidth, no resale options, game could be abandoned at any point and you'll have no recourse, etc.).

But to state it's doomed before it's even launched... hmm. Let's have them give it a shot, first?

Yeah.... I was just thinking the same thing. How quick we forget our history. This sounds like DIVX (not the codec - but what Circuit City was pushing) all over again, just without the physical medium (aka DIVX Disc).

What bothers me about these "subscription-based" consumer models is that a verification system is required to authenticate or "authorized" consumers. Such systems can easiely produce reports on consumer habbits and veiwing preferences. Reports could be given to Goverment agencies, FBI profiling can be modeled, etc... Granted, not really a big issue in a free society like ours (cough cough), but has anyone seen the German film "The Lives of Others"??

Some sort of license to work, i.e. they have to prove in some way that they know what they are talking about. Why are you trying to hold someone in an entry-level job up to the same standard as a "professional"?

"The concept of parity-based RAID (levels 3, 5 and 6) is now pretty old in technological terms, and the technology's limitations will become pretty clear in the not-too-distant future â" and are probably obvious to some users already. In my opinion, RAID-6 is a reliability Band Aid for RAID-5, and going from one parity drive to two is simply delaying the inevitable.

"The bottom line is this: Disk density has increased far more than performance and hard error rates haven't changed much, creating much greater RAID rebuild times and a much higher risk of data loss. In short, it's a scenario that will eventually require a solution, if not a whole new way of storing and protecting data."Link to Original Source

Posted
by
Soulskillon Saturday April 11, 2009 @10:21AM
from the see-ya-to-da-iss-eh dept.

AndreV writes "We've entered into an extraterrestrial quid pro quo with our Northern neighbors: After celebrating 25 years of the Canadarm's first venture into space, NASA has reached out (so to speak) to the Canadian Space Agency and begun research and development on a new generation of robotic arms, which would ultimately be used for the US agency's Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle that will provide transportation for Moon missions and jaunts to the international space station. In exchange, Canada will trade the robotic-limb technology's use on Orion and other future US-manned spacecraft for flight time for Canadian astronauts. And seeing solid results shouldn't be far off — the engineering company designing the bionic branch, responsible for the previous Canadarms, has already begun investigating the effects of zero gravity on their components. (Another forward-looking project being bartered for astronaut time is a rover for the Moon and Mars.) Fair trade?"

Lucas123 writes: "While vinyl record sales have seen small but steady gains over the past few years, they doubled this past year to almost 2 million, according to Nielsen ratings. Most of the sales are coming from indy stores, but also online sales have also doubled. The leap is being attributed not to older aficionados, but teens and young adults who are finding better sound quality from LPs and aesthetic value in owning a record collection. "I think holding that 12-by-12 piece of art and holding that record in their hand is creating the buzz," said Steven Sheldon, president of Los Angeles-based Rainbo Records, which has been pressig vinyl since 1955."Link to Original Source

rms writes: Novell's Linux business grew by 33 percent over the fourth quarter last year, according to the company's latest financial figures. Identity and access management revenues were up 11 percent compared to the same period last year, and systems and resource management revenues climbed 15 percent.

bigstrat2003 writes: For the past day, Wizards of the Coast has had a countdown to "4dventure" on their web site. The countdown ran out at 6:30 eastern time today (and the web site promptly crashed), but stories are already appearing on the rest of the web. Wizards also has had their 4th edition forums up for a couple of days.

330 Items grace this years list and rage from the strange (198. The most disgusting ice cream flavor on the market — 3 points) to the frightening (219. Build the Internet as described by Ted Stevens — 60 points) to the seemingly impossible (252. While at Carhenge, drive the earth into the sun! 1,000,000,000 points).